Free music software round-up: Week 94

New sound generators and processors

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It's the usual mix of free goodies this week: classic hardware emulations and fresh designs in the both the instrument and effect plug-in categories. To top things off, there's even a game that might just improve your mixing technique.

Distorque Rangebastard

Guitarists will be familiar with the Dallas Rangemaster treble booster (it and similar products were used by the likes of Eric Clapton and Brian May) and now here's a digital emulation. As well as offering the features of the original, there are additional controls for using it as a full range booster, an overdrive and more.

Manx Gigmate

Modelled on real vintage analogue hardware, this virtual instrument features polyphonic and monophonic sections, oscillator sync and MIDI learn for all parameters. Although it's free, it's designed to showcase what Manx is capable of, so is based on the same design principles as its other synths.

V-plugs Mr. Soundman

This won't improve your music directly, but in the long term, it just might. It's essentially a game that requires you to listen to audio that has a noticeable boost somewhere across the frequency range - you have to identify the boosted frequency. The theory is that in doing so your mixing skills will improve.

JC Productionz Sonix 2

This dual granulator can accept a MIDI input, which means it can be 'played' from your MIDI keyboard. Each granulator gives you control of pitch, level, grain rate (syncable), grain size, phase, envelope and gliss. It's fully automatable and works in mono or stereo.

CWI Technology TX16Wx

Technically still in beta, this free soft sampler is already looking pretty sharp, particularly if you're a fan of '80s and '90s hardware. It's multitimbral, offers 128 voices of polyphony, and sports both a 24dB resonant filter and two LFO and two modulation envelopes per voice.

DSK SynthDrums

A 12-patch drum synth, and one that apparently makes it easy to assign sounds to your keyboard. You're given plenty of sound design options, parameter automation and filter, distortion and EQ processors.